ICCup

The International Cyber Cup (ICCup) is a fanpage supporting titles like StarCraft Brood War, Defense of the Ancients, Counter Strike and World of Warcraft. It is most known for hosting the PVPGN based server The Abyss, which features a popular ladder system. As the ladder's name implies, players from all over the world are allowed to participate.

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ICCup was first launched in 2007 in cooperation with the Russian platform TheAbyss.ru by Andrey "YelloAnt" Zhbankov[1]. The first ladder seasons were almost only used by the Russian community, since the page only supported Russian as official language. In later months more and more of the foreign players joined the server, especially since the downfall of the PGTour server.

In the later years a lot of Korean amateurs populated the server and with the increasing competition even professional players participated in the ladder. In between 2008 and 2010 ICCup was the most active server, both for the foreign and Korean community. It was used for almost all foreign events, including BWCL, WGTCL and the Teamliquid Starleague.

After the StarCraft II Beta ICCup's population started to dwindle. Over 80% of the users left the server. Especially the Koreans migrated to the Fish Server, which offered better support and was easier to connect to.

Like most gaming ladders, players play games and are awarded or subtracted points depending on their performance in each game. Users are ranked by their current point totals: E being the lowest possible rank (represented next to the user name as a keyboard and mouse), with A+ and Olympic being the second highest and highest ranks, respectively. The speciality lies in the so-called map of the weeks (MOTW). Every week, usually around Sundays, five weeks are selected as MOTW. On these maps the players win 130% of the points, if their auto-hack is enabled.

iCCup offers a launcher which detects if the player using it is running hacks at the same time. It also offers reduced latency and includes Chaosplugin. Unlike other launchers it doesn't offer additional plug-ins, like APM Alert.

Since the Korean professional players usually used smurfs (aliases) to play anonymously on the server, several threads on fan pages like Teamliquid were opened for each season to 'hunt' down the real names.

The ICCup Elo Event Rating is a list published irregularly by the administration of International Cyber Cup since December 2012[2]. It ranks foreign players based on the Elo Number calculated according to their recent performance in individual and team leagues.